4-21-08, 9:43 am
In his newest book, Blows Against the Empire, author Gerald Horne looks at U.S. imperialism’s growing crisis with another economic “superpower,” the increasingly united Europe Union. One point of sharp competition has been between the dollar and the euro, the currency of the EU, which has grown in value against the declining dollar recently. But currency competition is only one sign of the growing intensity of the rivalry between the U.S. and Europe for markets and hegemony.
U.S. imperialism is having huge problems with what was its greatest achievement: the 'new Russia.' Today, Russia, hailed as democracy’s ultimate triumph over communism, has dreams of becoming a major player in Europe for its oligarchs and monopolists. (It is now a very distant second to the U.S. in its number of billionaires.) Becoming “a player” means becoming a competitor with the various blocs of capitalist countries, which has nothing to do with “free markets” and is the sort of competition that U.S. cold warriors neither wanted nor expected.
Counting Russia and the European Union, Europe contains 500 million people with enormous productive capacity and skilled labor. (Labor in Russia and the new Eastern Europe, however, is relatively cheap.) The situation as it stands has produced strong competition for U.S. capitalists and is less a triumph than an enormous problem for U.S. imperialism which was able to control capitalist Europe pretty effectively through most of the Cold War.
In discussing capitalists and their striving for domination, it is worth also talking about resistance. As such, Horne writes about the role of Communist parties in Europe which, though weakened in recent years, retain significant influence in trade union movements and many areas of society. These parties, along with other left forces have a long history of opposing European imperialism. And of course there are tens of millions of Europeans (many who supported the NATO bloc and continue to support center-right politics) who for a variety of reasons see the U.S., as Horne contends, “a threat to human existence.” The invasions of Afghanistan and especially Iraq have helped to crystallize these sentiments, but they, as Horne notes, were already present at the beginning of the Bush administration.
Horne is by no means cheerleading for the European Union and capitalist-oriented Russia over the U.S. and its associates. These are inter-imperialist rivalries, he argues, and they are expanding significantly and rapidly as diverse U.S. corporations such as Chiquita Banana, Microsoft, and Boeing find themselves in bitter legal conflicts with European Union firms over their alleged monopolistic practices. Also, there are potentially dangerous military sides to these struggles, as the European Union seeks to develop its own satellite navigation system to gain “independence' from the U.S., and both Russia and China seek to develop their own systems, which of course are necessary for modern warfare.
Competition over setting international trade policy has also sharpened. The World Trade Organization, one of the “big three” of capitalist global institutions (along with the IMF and the World Bank), which became the most powerful institution ever established under the capitalist mode of production after World War II, is now becoming more and more of an arena of struggle between Washington and Brussels, where both the European Union and NATO are headquartered.
Aggressive U.S. militarism has alarmed many friendly countries. As Horne recounts, the Bush administration has stumbled from one disaster after another as it seeks to impose its will on both former enemies and allies who may be well on their way to becoming former allies. And, as Horne notes, history continues to play tricks on U.S. imperialists as the new mixed economy China, led by the Chinese Communist Party, and the would-be capitalist great power, Russia, led by anti-Communists, develop a closer relationship with each other in economic and possibly military terms than the Soviet Union and China under Mao had from 1960 to the fall of the USSR in 1991. 'Conflict between Moscow and Beijing,' Horne perceptively argues, “Which was essential to the collapse of the former Soviet Union, has been reversed with consequences of enormous magnitude for the fate of U.S. imperialism.”
Everywhere opposition to Bush’s aggressive policies is mounting, but the dangers are I would contend also growing sharply. Horne concludes with accounts of the U.S. absorbing former Soviet Republics and allies into its military systems (and also the brutal role of NATO dismembering Yugoslavia in the 1990s) while the European Union has absorbed a number of the Warsaw Treaty countries.
The present “missile defense” scheme which the U.S. government is pushing in the Czech Republic and Poland is, as Horne notes in his conclusions, unpopular and dangerous for Europe. Neither the European Union, nor “new Russia,” are pursuing policies that contribute to peaceful development and conflict resolution on the world scene even though they increasingly look good to people through the world when compared to the U.S. government. In Eastern Europe most people know what virtually all Russians know, that “missile defense” is a continuation of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars and is really aimed at Moscow. It is a potential first strike weapon.
Whether the disastrous and discredited policies of the Bush administration and for that matter much of the Clinton administration in a less extreme way are reversed in the next administration or expanded, as they would certainly be with a McCain victory, will hold the key to U.S.-European Union relations, along with U.S. relations with the rest of the world.
